What might it be like – as a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (Nobody) – to BE a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (A body)?

I’m not sure HOW to answer that.

“Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart

of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.”

Edmond Jabes –

i.e. How that can be answered.

– WHO or WHAT answers – ?

WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE…TO BE?

(qualified to ANSWER)

can ANYthing “answer”?

does “answering” imply “language”?

WHAT IS AN ANSWER?

(in relation to – ?)

What is(?) Nathan Wayne Filbert, Alias Harlequin?

IS “Nathan Wayne Filbert”?

WHAT IS?

WHAT IS IS?

(how?)

WHAT IS A QUESTION?And WHY/HOW can a question be asked?

WHAT IS IT – are our – ideas? – To “IMAGINE”?

what are ideas?

What might it be to “conceive”?

“to generate concepts” (D&G)

framings of our world-experience

[WHY? HOW?

WHAT FOR?]

WHAT is a “person”? HOW? WHY? WHO?

Always and ever – HOW & WHY can we / do weASK?

WHO QUESTIONS?

(WHAT)?

(HOW)?

Something begins

(in/with all this)

it would seem

(it seems)

it seems that something begins in/with questioning

Alias Harlequin, i.e.

– the one whom this effects, the one on whom this has effect, the one (same? No!) affected by him or her, by whom and it. By this. This. That. By Other, others, and therefore, Alias again, patchworked and quilted, becoming, undoing, altering. Alias.

“Presumably most writers have many more ideas than they are able to act on”

Alias, i.e. as effected by “Hallie Noel Linnebur”; as effected (generated? Co-composed-with-) “Pauline Margaret Kresin Filbert”; the St Bernard “Zorro”; a specific train on a particular journey at a particular time; that mountain in that moment; Dec. 16, 1997 – a flu; and so on…

Name/term/signal/sign (“Alias”) as related to HNL, Dr. K, Dostoevsky, rustled grass, these sounds, this space-time and its company (surround) and then again, these again (but never “again”) – designating “NOWs”. Perhaps. It depends.

What or Who, How “Alias Harlequin” ALWAYS depends on a totality of other dependencies, as it were (or is?) “As such.”

Alias Harlequin, representative? Not that can of worms. AND the “thing” itself? (network of momentary dependencies-in-relation)?

What might we call (it/him/etc.) then? And what would “calling” be/do – how?

WHO questions?

This Alias Harlequin.

“I am already so much the inscription of a divergence…What I was, if that could be described, was a whirlwind of tensions…”

–Helene Cixous–

“A word is binding and at the same time breaks our bonds. To which of them shall I, one day, owe my freedom?”

Like this:

He changed his clothes, wearing a color he usually would not. And of course the day was different. “Sameness” (from one moment to the next) is a difficult seed to piece. Yet, he’s identifiable.

Last year, his hair was cut. By a trusted friend, no doubt, yet it hadn’t been severed for nearly two decades. His behavior altered, his manner of speaking and greeting. Him. But (to those who knew him) he was still recognizable. Somehow. Even if not so much to himself.

Humans are strange. There’s the sound of rain. Emotions. Appearances. Sunlight. And many other things besides. There is language, for instance. And touch. Scents. Each tiny change – alteration/adaptation – is micro- and macro-scopic. Is. Effective and affective. Not easily discounted.

****************************************

******************************************

She did not want to interact with him. That, at least that (much) was clear.

She sat down, she closed her eyes.

She wished to stop the opportunity. As if to say – “I am now sleeping. You (any other) cannot reach me.” Any (other) – even (you) – blanked out, refused, forgotten.” “I am asleep. Do Not Disturb (me). I am Off Limits to you (any) you.”

He understands. Reads sign signals. Goes silent. Writes on paper.

His dialogue – a wounded scraggly trail of hurt – writing.

No one (wants to) listen(s) to him: so he wails, expresses, tells, shares his story with flattened and dehydrated tree-pulp. He draws confessions (conventional words), his family-language, blah blah blah – onto surfaces of desiccated dying.

So he might feel (an eensy-weensy tiny-whiny) a little bit that he matters. That (i.e his feelings, experiences, being) is not ONLY shut out by closing (closed) eyes, but may (in fact) –

Like this:

How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress. For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness. Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.

Is this another emerging effect of aging?

My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage. Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)

which means that I also approach 50.

So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…

I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.

One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE. Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss. Anything. The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…

FITS & STARTS

I shoulda wrote a letter. There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes. “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW. The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes. The breaths, the touches, the thoughts. The feel of it all.

The word/concept/term “Mashup.”

Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness. My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator. To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup. Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…

Like this:

In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt at an entity’s expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuit I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduce as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for a project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…

…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseen modification, development, emergence…

“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,

fragments that are still within the context…”

– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka –

There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…

think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract

befriend your body, take care with your mind

be gentle, be open. move fluidly, breathe

go alert to your dreams

wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes

be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard

keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince

don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again

Like this:

Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again. Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand. Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind. One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.

– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –

Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.

For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.

Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.

Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Thinking.

Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,

the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,

grew redundant with desire…

…desire for language to do some certain things,

…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:

to write the ambiguities.

Repeatedly: to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal. Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear. That light in which even our shadows go unseen.